Video: street blockades starting with a hard lockdown (w lockboxes), then mobile tactics delay and disrupt Netanyahu’s motorcade. Includes motorcade vehicles (probably advance vehicles) failing to defeat a blockade and having to retreat West back towards the White House
Video: powerful blasts from police munitions near Union Station
Video: US flag comes down, Palestinian flag goes up, and Netanyahu burns in effigy at Union Station
We began with at least one hard blockade on Independence Ave, featuring two crews with lockboxes to hold their ground. Cops pushed back the overall crowd, exposing the locked down protesters who were more difficult to move. This led to several arrests.
After that, protesters switched tactics to multiple roving, mobile blockade crews. These would hold an intersection until things got untenable, then move on and strike again. Sting and move, sting and move.
Intercepted police comms showed chaos, with cops unable to figure out where to send their own forces-and unable to find ANY route for Netanyahu’s motorcade.
Eventually he found a way in, unknown if this was before or after the various blockades picked up and joined into a single large march attempting to surround the Capitol with marchers.
Union Station DID get surrounded, and there things got seriously spicy. One cop tried to charge and arrest someone, only to trip and go down. Cops made a failed attempt to stop the burning of the US flags from the flagpoles, making a couple arrests only to have the entire crowd turn and advance on them with fury and determination. The cops took their hostages and ran, with protesters in pursuit. They were lucky to escape without having to cough up those hostages to get away.
Protesters then returned tp their targets, pulling down and burning the US flags outside Union Station, then burning them. An effigy of Netanayahu was barebecued over one of the flags.
There were also a number of flashbangs, two of them very, very powerful. I directly asked a line of the cops “were those your munitions?” getting no answer. These can thus be assumed to be police flashbangs, with the stone architecture in the area boosting the sound of the blasts.